The reason is that Super Paper Mario dared to do something different. Its two immediate predecessors both fit fairly well into the traditional role-playing genre – story-driven adventures with turn-based battle sequences. Super Paper Mario kicked that style of battling aside to focus on more immediate action – its gameplay was more in line with older Mario games, where hopping on a Goomba's heads simply defeated it on the spot instead of triggering a cut-away transition to a separate combat screen. Super Paper Mario was faster and more fluid as a result, and while it still had RPG elements in its design – including an incredibly detailed and text-heavy storyline – it was hard to classify it alongside the previous Paper adventures as a "real" role-playing game.
Opinions were split when Super Paper Mario shipped for the Wii five years ago, as some fans appreciated the gameplay shift while others bemoaned the removal of turn-based battling. It wasn't until recently, though, that we found out what that extra action emphasis would mean for the franchise going forward. As it turns out, nothing much.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star is set to ignore the tangent that Super Paper Mario took with its design and instead offer us another more traditional RPG experience. There's a slight thematic shift to having battles controlled by using collectible stickers, but underneath it's turn-based, rhythm-rewarding combat the same as we first saw in the 2001 series debut. And since we now know that the new Paper Mario is going back to its roots, we also know something else too.
That Super Paper Mario was a one-and-done.
Nintendo has done this a few times over the years. You can go back as far as the NES era to find examples like Super Mario Bros. 2 and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, or you can look to more modern titles like Mario Kart: Double Dash!! All of them were one-and-dones in the sense that they were all sequels in established, on-going series. Each dared to do something different, and then each series went back to doing things the "normal" way immediately afterward. Multiple selectable characters in a Mario side-scroller, each with unique abilities? A separation of Hyrule into birds-eye exploration and 2D side-scrolling action? Two characters riding around on each go-kart together? All of these were intriguing gameplay changes over what came before, but none of them were ever used again.
Super Paper Mario seems like it'll be next in joining Nintendo's one-and-done collection, which is a shame. To me, Super Paper Mario wasn't just a Paper Mario game that did battles differently, but rather a brilliantly individual concept in world exploration. The game's big hook – beyond its visual style and streamlined combat – was the fact that it let you flip its worlds.
Mario started off in 2D, as usual, looking all flat and flimsy in his Papery form. But very early into the adventure you gained the power to rotate the camera 90 degrees, instantly transforming flat, 2D scenery seen from "the side" into full 3D environments viewed from "behind." Nintendo's designers had a ton of fun playing around with the different perspectives, as many of the game's puzzles dealt with interacting with things from both angles – you'd come to an impassable pit in the 2D space, flip the scenery and find that a hill in the background was actually a curved bridge you could walk across. You'd encounter blocks to hit in one perspective that would spin around and settle into the other, making new platforms for Mario to hop across. It was fresh. It was fun.
And now we'll probably never see it again. The Paper Mario series had two directions it could have continued in – it could have continued on from Super Paper Mario, using its design as the new "normal" in a series evolving over time. Or it could go back to traditional turn-based battling, settling back into the older template. Nintendo chose the latter, and because of that choice, it seems like the innovations Super Paper Mario introduced in environment exploration will be getting the axe as well.
Now, that's a lot of doom and gloom for Super Paper Mario fans – those of us who truly appreciated the new direction Nintendo chose five years ago and liked where things looked to be heading for this series. But even now that the franchise has doubled back, I'm still hopeful for the future. Here's why.
First, we don't yet know everything there is to know about Paper Mario: Sticker Star. Its battles are going back to turn-based, sure, but Nintendo has been especially quiet about the adventure beyond that – not even presenting a playable demo at E3 this year. So it's entirely possible that the inventive, perspective-flipping gameplay of Super Paper Mario could still live on in the series in some form during Sticker Star's environment exploration sequences (even if there aren't any helpful Pixls around.)
Next, it's by no means a terrible fate for a Nintendo game to go down in history as a one-and-done. The Big N's designers are so endlessly creative that there's no way each unique idea to come along even gets the chance to be used in a game – so these solo-outing mechanics and concepts are already better off than the thousands of other ideas sitting on the cutting room floor. I'd love a world in which we got a second take on Double Dash's driving duos or Zelda II's split viewpoint, to see what more could have been done with those ideas. But maybe it's those games' uniqueness, years later, that's helping me remember them so fondly to begin with.
Last and best of all for Super Paper Mario is the fact that the game itself has held up beautifully over the past five years. It was a late-generation GameCube project when it first went into development that finally shipped for Wii after being ported over and overhauled to take advantage of the Wii's controller. But now, just months away from the arrival of the next hardware generation, it's still just as fun and worthy of your time as it was in 2007. Better yet, it's become a part of the Nintendo Selects line of budget-priced games in the meanwhile, so if you missed it the first time around or got into Wii ownership a little later, you can grab a fresh copy in stores right now for just 20 bucks.
And I advise you to do just that. Because Super Paper Mario, while it may never inspire its own direct sequel in the future, is a brilliant game, even just as a one-and-done.
Source : feeds.ign.com
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